Preaching to the converted

Sunday Herald, The, Oct 31, 2004 by Leon McDermott

THE BIG CD Manic Street Preachers Lifeblood (Sony) 2/5

IN music - much as in politics, with the honourable exception of tea-drinking man of the people Anthony Wedgwood Benn - you almost always become what you started out hating. Scratch a hippie and you'll find small-minded conservatism rather than free-thinking liberalism; let a punk talk for long enough and you'll find a Tory in egalitarian clothing. (The outrage that greeted Paul Weller in 1979 when he said he'd vote for Thatcher was, you get the feeling, motivated not so much by disgust as the anger of thousands of Little England punks at having their cover blown.) And so it is with the Manic Street Preachers. Less revolutionary than they were reactionary (although, usually, it's only time that separates the latter from the former), they appeared, in 1990, in a haze of dumb but effective political sloganeering, badly applied eyeliner and stencilled blouses. They said they'd set themselves on fire on Top Of The Pops. They said their debut album would sell 30 million copies and then they'd instantly split up. They made controversial statements in the music press, claiming that they hated long-forgotten shoegazers Slowdive more than they hated Hitler.

Still, they always seemed to have something: for all the bluster and the deliberately controversial soundbites, they were intelligent: their lyrics full of literary allusions, their record sleeves weighed down by quotes from philosophers, activists, politicians and writers.

If you'd told the average Manics fan a decade back that they'd one day write an apologia for Richard Nixon, you'd have been met with a horrified gasp - yet here it is, The Love Of Richard Nixon: a summery slice of pop melancholia that essentially makes the claim that well, you know, he was a misunderstood guy.

Forget about Watergate, about his and Henry Kissinger's murderous forays into South American politics, about the fact that he scuppered the treaty that could have ended the Vietnam war in 1968, purely for electoral gain. "People forget China, and your war on cancer," James Dean Bradfield sings with such banality that it's hard to take anything on this album seriously.

Maybe it's a joke, a laugh at the expense of anyone who ever thought the Manics believed in anything but surface (though it appears to be done in all seriousness). Maybe it's contrarian old age, the real sentiments of a band whose political core vanished when guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards abandoned his car near the Severn Bridge nine years ago, never to be seen again.

Apart from the commercial and critical failure of their last album, the punkish Know Your Enemy (launched in Cuba, with Nixon's old enemy Fidel Castro in attendance), the past decade of the Manics has been one of plenty: album sales, acclaim for dealing with the disappearance of a friend with dignity, and an increasingly lush palette of sound. Lifeblood, for all its keyboard washes and shimmering guitars, is an oddly dead album; polished and adult, yes, but (barring the excellent To Repel Ghosts) lacking anything approaching either anger or emotional bite.

The problem here isn't that the band should preserve their younger persona in aspic - who, except for Limp Bizkit fans, wants to hear grown men angsting around like disaffected teenagers?. The problem is that on songs like 1985, I Live To Fall Asleep and Solitude Sometimes Is, they sound like a band who long ago ceased caring about anything. Too old for post-modern irony, they've slipped into an apathetic musical coma. There is some respite. To Repel Ghosts contains something of the orchestral glory that characterised Everything Must Go, and the closing Cardiff Afterlife is a sweet, minor-key tribute to Richey Edwards.

That, however, isn't enough to save Lifeblood from itself. Where it should soar, it flops to the ground, and when it ought to be full of energy, it's lethargic and anaemic. For a band whose best music was sustained by adrenalin, righteous anger and a belief in the power of thought, it's a sorry state of affairs: not so much an admission of defeat as a declaration that the battle wasn't even worth fighting.

RECOMMENDED DOWNLOAD:

To Repel Ghosts Five MANICS tracks you can't live without and where to download them

IN this new series, our rock critic Leon McDermott will recommend five essential tracks by the artist of the week. First up are the Manic Street Preachers. They may have lost some form recently, but at their creative peak they were the most incendiary band of the 1990s. For details on where to buy legal downloads of these tracks, visit www.sundayherald.com/e-music.

Motorcycle Emptiness (1992) The Manics always said they wanted to be bigger than Guns'N'Roses, and this was the song that should have realised that dream. A big, haunted rock ballad that marked out the Manics' territory - angst, apathy, and damn big choruses.

La Tristesse Durera (Scream To A Sigh) (1993) The point where the stadium rock hopes of the early Manics are properly solidified, and a bona fide classic into the bargain. It starts quietly, vocalist James Dean Bradfield playing the part of a hard-done-by war veteran. Then the guitars and drums explode and it becomes a poignant, gorgeous refutation of the glorification of war.